This week marks an important milestone in Telerik’s native mobile story - it is the public beta release of UI for Windows Universal. UI for Windows Universal is a set of UI controls for building native Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 applications.

What’s included in UI for Windows Universal Q3 2014 BETA?

Chart. The control supports various chart series, among which are Bar, Line, Area, Pie, Scatter, Polar and OHLC. Additional features include multiple data series, annotations; empty values pan&zoom interaction.

DataBoundListBox is currently available for Windows Phone 8.1 only. It will become universal with the official Q3 2014 release. Some of the supported features are: UI virtualization for large data sets, pull to refresh, item animations, multi-selection, item reordering, empty content etc.

DatePicker enables selecting day, month and year. Developers can change the format of the displayed date or how the date elements (day/month/year) are arranged. Furthermore developers can define ranges of dates, thus limiting what dates the end users can select.

TimePicker enables selecting time, hour and minute. Developers can change the format of the displayed time or how the time elements (hour/minute) are arranged.

AutoCompleteBox can be populated either by a local array or remote data like movies database or list of stocks coming from an online service. The performance remains fast and fluid when working with suggestions and large sets of data.

BusyIndicator allows developers to display an animation indicating that the application is busy waiting for an asynchronous operation to finish. The control comes with a bunch of predefined animations but also allows for setting a custom one.

Rating enables in-app evaluation through a range of rating items associated with a given value.

The installation bits also include a dashboard demo app that showcases the universal controls.

Cross Platform

UI for Windows Universal is the next pillar in Telerik’s native mobile story. The goal of UI for Android, UI for iOS and UI for Windows Universal is to offer a consistent way for developers to create both platform specific and cross-platform applications.

Support

Customer requests are handled directly by the developers who build the tools. Customers can use the dedicated forums and feedback portal to submit, up vote and track product feedback.

Documentation

CHM documentation is included in the installation package. Online documentation will be available with the official Q3 2014 release.

Weekly Updates

We plan to deploy weekly product updates that will be available through your Telerik support account.

What’s next for UI for Windows Universal?

The official release is scheduled for the last week of October along with the Q3 2014 release of DevCraft. One of our goals will be to include all the UI for Windows 8 controls in UI for Windows Universal. The controls will be initially available only for the Windows 8.1 part of a universal app but we will enable them for Windows Phone 8.1 soon after that. Another initiative will be to enable the DataStorage and DataSync components for universal apps. We will also make the DataBoundListBox and Calendar controls universal. Finally Frozen Columns and ComboBox Columns will be available for the universal DataGridView. Dashboard source code examples will be released on GitHub.

What does Telerik offer?

Telerik has several products that native Windows developers can use – UI for Windows Phone 8, UI for Windows 8, and UI for Windows Universal. The Q&A section below should explain which Telerik products are available for the two development stacks.

Can I reference UI for Windows Universal in a Windows Phone Apps project (Windows Phone 8.1)?
Yes. Developers can use all Universal and Windows Phone 8.1 specific controls in their Windows Phone 8.1 project.

Can I reference UI for Windows Universal in a Windows Apps project (Windows 8.1)?
Yes. You will be able to use all Universal and Windows 8.1 specific controls in your Windows 8.1 project. This means that you can use UI for Windows 8 in your Windows 8.1 project.

Can I use UI for Windows Phone 8 to build Windows Phone 8.1 apps?
Yes. UI for Windows Phone 8 is part of the Silverlight development stack. Developers have the opportunity to create a Windows Phone 8 app and port it using Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1.

Can I use UI for Windows Phone 8 to build Windows Universal apps?
No. UI for Windows Phone 8 uses the Silverlight stack whereas the Windows Universal apps use the new Windows Runtime.

Can I use UI for Windows 8 to build Windows Universal apps?
In a way. UI for Windows 8 can be referenced only in stand-alone Windows 8.1 projects and the Windows 8.1 part of a universal application.

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7 Comments

Phil Harris
07 Aug 2014

Kiril - Thks

1. Did I just see a Xamarin Tooling diagram ? Does this mean you will be using the Xamarin.Forms architecture to bring custom platform Renderers to enable Telerik [awesome] controls for all 4 platforms ? Can you elaborate on this a bit, as the .NET Xamarin tooling is excellent, but lacks controls for the IOS and Droid platforms

Thierry
08 Aug 2014

The Universal App concept from Microsoft is great and we're very happy to see Telerik delivering UI for Windows Universal. Can't wait to get our hands in it.